Gadgetopia

AN AUDIOBLOGGING MANIFESTO: This is an awfully good and funny bit of writing (and oration — here’s the MP3 version so you can hear the irony…). It’s an argument against audioblogging, from both a practical and philosophical point-of-view.

Ask yourself — is the key to making your site more interesting really to add rich media? Or is it possible that if you took more care in your writing, said something passionate, grammatical, interesting, and pleasant to read, it would actually make more of a difference? […]

Just because you’re going to be able to do a real-time three dimensional high-definition interactive virtual reality fly-through of the inside of your cat - does that mean you should? Does that mean it belongs on your website? This is not the legacy we want to leave! So stop the ridiculous self indulgence, and shut up and write.

He makes a great point. I don’t have time to sit and listen to someone talk. I like to read, not listen so much. (Also, note the not-so-subtle humor of the speaker spelling out every URL, down to the last colon, slash, dot, and capital letter. The length of Winer’s Harvard URL almost makes you squirm listening to him.)

When I first logged on in 1996, one of the first great debates I was witness to on the original MSN (of which I was a beta tester, incidentally), was between people discussing what the next measure of communication greatness was going to be.

Was the fact that almost everything on the Net was written (then, anyway) detract from the great orators and give more power to the great writers? Will the tongue-tied be imbued with more power since writing is the great equalizer of the Internet? Who knows?

An absolute classic New Yorker cartoon shows a dog sitting in front of a computer talking to another dog: “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.” Well, not until you start audio and videoblogging, anyway.

Via Boing Boing.